Dead, Not Gone
by oranges-and-leather-boots
Summary: What's a ghost to do in Mystic Falls? Vicki Donovan decides to spend her death doing what she did best in life: messing with boys' heads. If this involves making Jeremy and Tyler fall desperately for each other, well, blame it on the boredom. SLASH
1. Chapter 1

**Hallo again. Hopefully at least some of you will be the same people as last time given how much time you spent telling me to write more Jyler. **

**And this is, in fact, more Jyler, based on an idea which I am totally in love with and which was provided for me by Onecoldn'tsee-so if you like it, be nice to her. And me too, obviously. But it is requiring me for the first time to have an ACTUAL WARNING LIST, which will be long, so the strong-of-heart should simply skip this, although it will give you a better idea of what on earth will be going on.**

**WARNING(S):**

**Main Character Death**

**(Eventual) detailed descriptions of (nonviolent but icky) Character Death**

**Character refusal to go away despite Character Death**

**THE GIRL WE LOVE TO HATE in large doses. No, she doesn't GRAPHICALLY sleep with anyone because I can't bring myself to write that, but she is definitely a presence.**

**Oh for the love of I'm not even going to bother whatever I suppose if you didn't get the message SLASH BY THE SPARKLING BARREL LOAD**

**Drug use, over-dose, and drug-addiction**

**Tyler-addiction**

**Tyler-seriously-yes-that-counts-as-a-warning**

**MINOR SLIGHTLY WONKY AU-ness, because, while technically all the events I need for this premise happen on the show, so do VAMPIRES and WEREWOLVES and shit I don't want to deal with, so, I'm changing things around a bit. I don't think it makes the characters OC, but, well.**

**Female character written by a non-female person and also possessing a non-female body, so, sorry about that, and also eventually I got bored and decided to include some ACTUAL ISSUES(dun dun dun DUN), so if you have a problem with discussions of gender identity, gender ambiguity, or transsexuality...oh for goodness sakes what are you reading my writing for anyway? If you feel that my giving Vicky any of these issues makes her OC, well, that's what the pretty Review Button is for, my darlings.**

**(Eventual) Sluttishness, sort-of-maybe-you-could-think-of-it-as rape because someone else IS controlling his body at the time, but believe me, he enjoys it, so I think consent is given.**

**Jeremy gets man(and ghost)handled a lot. That's probably the most worrying thing, actually, but almost certainly none of you will care.  
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**ALL CHARACTERS ARE IN GRAVE DANGER OF BEING EATEN BY CROCODILES BECAUSE THEY SPEND SO MUCH TIME IN THE GODDAMN RIVER DENIAL**

**And, for the more delicate readers...this time _Jeremy_ is the dick who says bad words.**

**OK I think you're ready now. So jump in, and watch out for the things that look like floating logs because they MAY try to bite you, and if you find any pretty sparkly reviews, comments, or compliments along the way I will be HAPPY to look after them for you.**

**Geronimo.  
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**...**

**...**

So she had been a bit of a bitch. Weren't you supposed to forgive and forget when a person was dead?

Not that she was so wrapped up in the whole forgiving thing, personally. It was more the _being _forgiven she was interested in; after all, until recently, she hadn't really thought she'd be around to be doing anything much.

She particularly hadn't thought, Vicki Donovan reflected, that she'd be sitting on her own gravestone. Her perfectly tangible, undeniably solid gravestone, made out of very real granite, with her full name very definitely inscribed in its speckled surface. Its stolid presence beneath her was making it a great deal harder to pretend that all of this wasn't happening.

And she would have liked to, she thought, looking up at the shimmering beech leaves that rose over her grave. She would have really quite liked to be able to pretend that all of this wasn't happening. Not the being-dead part: she had gotten used to that, because now that most of her vague preconceptions of the afterlife had gone out the figurative window, what it came down to was not being alive, and that sure wasn't something she'd miss very much.

But the no-visitors aspect of it all. _That_ was enough to get a dead girl down.

Oh, her family had been there, for the funeral and all—which she didn't remember entirely clearly, given that she'd been little more than a self-conscious fog back then. It had taken her almost two weeks to start feeling like herself again, and by now she was mostly back to normal. But in that time, they hadn't visited once. And she was alright with that, she supposed, kicking at a stone with one bare foot. She wasn't sure, deep down, that she wanted to see her family. She certainly hadn't when she was alive. And the biggest shock, or even letdown, about death was that it really didn't change much of anything. Just like in life, her family was a comforting presence in the distance, offering the idea and memory of love. But she didn't feel the need to get any closer, or to remind herself of how love hurt when you were surrounded by too much of it.

She certainly didn't look for many visits from her school friends—because it wasn't like she had ever gone to school, and neither had most of the people her own age she knew. None of them were likely to be visiting her here, while they were probably still busy doing exactly what she had always done, and she frankly didn't mind very much. Vicki had had enough of druggies for a while. Specifically, she had had enough of being one, about three weeks after that might have been helpful to her.

She'd be mad to expect flowers from her boyfriend, given that Tyler probably hadn't even noticed she was dead. He hadn't seemed to remember she was alive most of the time.

And that left…well, pretty much no one, admittedly, who she could reasonably expect to bother coming all the way to the cemetery for her. Vicki frowned, and flipped a bit of hair out of her eyes. Hell, she wouldn't have attended her funeral herself if she had been given any choice in the matter. But still, the lack of attention rankled.

She tapped her foot on the big rock, and watched birds. Damn fluttery things. She was fairly sure the grass had gown noticeably since she first sat down here, and amused herself for a while by trying to see it change. A very short while.

That, she thought, was exactly why no one was coming. In her not-very-lamentably shortened life, Vicki Donovan had done exactly nothing more constructive or interesting than popping pills and waiting for the grass to grow.

"Oh fuck that," she said, and jumped down onto the little sprouts atop her grave, taking a certain amount of pleasure in at least pretending to flatten them. She picked up her shoes, which left no mark where they had been lying, and headed crosswise towards the gate and the road that led back to Mystic Falls.

...

Jeremy was asleep when she arrived at the Gilbert's house. She knew, because she paused only briefly before clambering up the back porch to the ledge outside his window, and then paused for slightly longer, but only because she couldn't believe the idiot still kept his window open, despite how ridiculously easy she had told him it was to break in through it. Hopping through, she stood at his bedside, and gazed down at him as he lay there, shoes on and on top of the covers, apparently with music still screeching though his headphones. It was kind of cute, really.

She looked at him for a minute, and then lifted her right hand and looked at it and at him through it, given that it was, even to her, slightly translucent. Vicki spread her fingers to admire the effect. Jeremy appeared to have a kind of halo.

Then she closed her fingers into a fist, and punched him.

She hadn't expected it to be particularly effective, but she hadn't considered that she might simply pass through him. And she certainly hadn't considered that she would do more than that: as her fist neared him she felt an electric tingle and a tug, as though something was actually pulling her hand forward. But it was, she realized, a very pleasant tingle. Her arm _wanted_ to be closer. Vicki let it, and her hand hurtled forward and buried itself in Jeremy's oblivious stomach.

That, she thought, was odd. But then no, it wasn't. She was, after all, a spirit: her body wasn't an actual body, it was simply what went inside one. And it wanted to occupy a body again. So without further ado, and in what would be called a spirit of scientific curiosity if she had attended anything past fourth grade science lectures and knew what that was, she sat down on Jeremy's bed, and lay in Jeremy.

Jeremy screamed. Vicki considered screaming too, but decided instead to slap him.

"Fuck," Jeremy said loudly, or, Vicki was suddenly certain, thought. "What was that for? And why the hell are you in my dream?"

Vicki looked around. She was, she could feel, very definitely inside Jeremy. Warmth and blood and a thousand normal chemical processes bustled on around her, more sensed that seen or felt, and completely oblivious to her presence. She herself was now more of a cloud than a Vicki-shape, with the main part of her nestled snugly into the space inside his head.

Which was also, it seemed, where Jeremy was. He was, indeed, in a dream, she saw, peering closer at it. And so was she—a part of her had wormed its way inside, and she looked at Jeremy, both inside the dream and out.

Through the figure of her in dream she stared at Jeremy, sizing him up, and smiled.

Jeremy flinched. "Seriously, Vic," he said, the sound itself trying to avoid coming near her. "What, um, are you doing here?"

"I'm not part of your dream, Jeremy," she informed him. "Or, well, I guess I am. But you didn't make me up."

He blinked at her. "I. What?"

"I," she said happily, "am a ghost, Jer. A spirit. A…supernatural something or other. I'm dead, Jer, and talking to you. Get the picture?"

"I know you're dead," he said. "I mean…yeah. Oh, fuck. I mean, what are you…you're in my dream, for fuck's sake. You're not…"

"Not just in your dream, yes," Vicki interrupted him, and before he had time to do more than blink stupidly, which always took him a surprising amount of time, she reached a bit of herself into his limp right arm and smacked him in the face.

Jeremy jerked awake and upright, swearing yet again, and staring around for what had just hit him. Inside his brain, she performed the mental equivalent of jumping up and down and waving, and she could tell when he focused on her.

"Oh, damn motherfucking _hell,_" he said, and fell back into the pillows.

"Hello to you, too," she responded. "You can at least say…I don't know, welcome, or something."

"You're not," he groaned. "Why the hell are you in my head? You're not even real, and I'm too young to be going insane."

"In your case, I don't think it could happen quickly enough," she told him, "And in any case you're not. I'm as real as you are, and way better looking."

"Not real," he said, moronically, and covered his eyes with a spare pillow. "Not real not real not real, not real. This is not real. None of this is happening."

Vicki, getting bored, poked at him with his own hand, and he squeaked and twitched before hiding under the pillow again. "Dude, grow up," she said. "I'm not, like, Tinkerbell or something, I'm not going to vanish if you tell me I'm not here."

"That's not actually how Tinkerbell works," he complained. "She—"

"What. Ever,Jeremy. And anyway, you don't have to actually _talk_, that's really helping you look not crazy."

He was quiet, both inside and out, for a moment. Then he pushed away the pillow and lay for a while on his back, staring up at marks in the paint on his ceiling. Vicki, inside, marveled at the boy's ability to, apparently, not _think_ at all. Not that that was too surprising.

"Are you still there?" he thought, when he was done memorizing the appearance of the plaster.

Vicki thought the sound of snapping gum at him, and felt him wince.

"You'd miss me."

"Why are you here, Vicki?" he asked, still thinking, and while she ignored it she noticed that he sounded much more serious this time.

"Accepted I'm real, then?"

"Please just…answer, okay?" So, he had, but wasn't going to let himself think about it long enough to risk admitting it.

"Because I can," she answered promptly. "I mean, it turns out I can possess you, which I didn't think I could. And, frankly, it's fun." He groaned. "Shut up, Jeremy. I can make you do whatever the hell I want, which _I_ can't do without a body, I'm pretty sure, and now that I've got one again I'm going to do exactly that, whatever I want to. I'm bored. Death is seriously boring, Jer."

"So why not somebody _else_?"he complained, throwing his hands in the air.

"Um, because…I don't see why I should? Don't even _say_ to be nice. Anyway, why should I leave my nice, comfortable warm body and wander off looking for another one? Who'd I even use?"

He considered. "I don't know. Some chick, maybe? I'm a guy, that's kind of just weird."

"Oh, so like your sister," she suggested.

"No!"

"Keep your panties on, God. And you're girly enough as it is, thanks. You probably actually _do_ wear panties."

"Shut _up_," he said, sufficiently quickly to make her snicker. "And don't even think of checking," he added, as an afterthought.

"Oh, grow up, Jeremy," Vicki sighed. "And get a clue. Not like I haven't seen it before, plenty, and anyway _so_ not interested."

That made him pause yet again, and she watched his thoughts with interest, debating about poking them to see what they contained. When he thought at her again, though, his tone was more measured, and serious. He practically reeked of having a plan. "Fine, then," he thought. "So why don't you go possess _Tyler_, then. You certainly like his body plenty."

"This is true," Vicki conceded.

"So?"

"What."

"So. Go."

"No, thank you, I have a better plan, actually," she said, and, using his face, she smiled. "I'm very glad you made me think of it."

"Oh fuck," thought Jeremy.

"Yes, indeed," she agreed. "I have a boyfriend, Jeremy, who I _do_ like a lot. I am, currently dead, which means I don't have a body. But I do have yours. I am going to have," she said happily, "so _very _much fun."

Jeremy seemed to be trying to turn his eyes back into his head to stare at her. "I don't like this is going, Vicki," he thought, very slowly and quietly. "I really, really do not like where I think this might be going. Please tell me it isn't going there, and you aren't actually _insane_, Vicki."

"So we're going to have sex," Vicki said, happy as a cat in cream. "Him, and me. And you."

Jeremy sat up suddenly. "Excuse me," her said. "I need to go throw up."

"Jeremy." Jeremy put his fingers in his ears, and then realized that that was stupid. He appeared, instead, to be simply trying to shake her out of his skull.

"Stop that." He stopped.

"Good boy."

"It isn't going to work," he complained, "For one thing. Even if you can do…whatever you want to…with me, and I can't apparently stop you, which sucks and doesn't make sense, because this is _my body_—"

"It's because you're a wimp," she informed him.

"In any case, whatever you do to me, Tyler is not going to sleep with me," he said, as though explaining that, yes, it often got very dark at night.

Vicki considered. "Well, no. I think the word 'fuck' is more like what Tyler does. But I thought you'd prefer it if I didn't say that."

"Now that it comes to it, yeah, I would—really, _really_ would…but, um, neither of them is going to happen, Vicki," he told her, getting back into his stride. "You know how you and Tyler were screwing each other? Remember what that was like? And how, when you were doing it, one of you was a girl and the other wasn't? I'm not a girl, Vicki, Tyler isn't going to want to have sex with me."

"We never did," Vicki says, after a very long pause to build up her nerve. "Me, that is, and Tyler. We never actually had sex."

...

Which was embarrassing as hell to admit, obviously. It was also, factually, untrue, because she and Tyler had done a remarkable number of things that would qualify as sex and a few that would probably turn out to be illegal, but when it came to the particular kind of sex that Jeremy was, currently, trying to demonstrate by means of embarrassed hand gestures, there had been none. She hadn't even thought about it, really, because whether the…gestures…were being done or not, going out with Tyler Lockwood didn't really leave a lot of time for thinking, especially when most of your dates were to a different piece of furniture in his bedroom or, several times, the bed of his truck.

Then, all of a sudden, she had thought about it, as though…well, as though a ghost had planted the thought in her mind, she supposed. And that was when Vicki knew that she was almost certainly in love with her not-really-boyfriend, because she didn't even think to complain. She just began, in a different way than she always did when he walked because, well, she couldn't really help herself, to watch Tyler, when he was with her but wasn't looking at her, or when he was laughing with her brother and their usually drunk jock friends, or on afternoons when they went outside and the smell of the sun on the grass seemed to lull him nearly asleep. She liked lying on the grass next to Tyler.

And she was also certain of something. Vicki Donovan wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, even when she wasn't so high on stolen pharmaceuticals that she was practically a spoon. But even if she was shallow and talking wasn't her strong point, she wasn't stupid, and she wasn't blind, and she had a knack for finding out what other people didn't want her to know, as Matt had learned every time he tried to hide the last of the cookies from her. And Tyler was a cookie that Vicki most definitely wanted.

She was also absolutely certain that he was gay.

There was nothing in particular that said it, and she was also pretty sure that this was because he himself didn't know, and didn't want to find out. Tyler was, by far, the most affectionate of all her brother's friends, she saw when she watched them together. Given that it was Tyler, expressions of affection could range from frequent hugs to what would appear to most people to be casual violence, but still, it was there. And it was there when he talked about them, too—not all guys, and not even all of his close friends, as some people he clearly got along better with where inexplicably mentioned less than others. She was certain it wasn't just the way he was. Somewhere along the way Tyler had convinced himself that he liked and admired some boys because they must simply be worthy of admiration, for some reason or other, and so deserved the complete loyalty and veneration he gave to them as though they had some kind of superpowers. It was a fairly safe system, she thought, because if Tyler himself ever wondered why he behaved the way he did around a person, the answer was simply that they deserved it, and it was hard to think that your own friend wasn't a good person, so he'd simply leave it at that.

But Tyler still was a dam very close to breaking, and in the week or so before she'd died she remember thinking hard about how exactly she was supposed to keep her gay boyfriend.

Something she was fairly determined to do, especially since the realization, which had piggybacked into her mind on the first one, that she didn't dislike the thought of Tyler imagining another guy when he was with her. Or at least, not so long as that boy could be…well, her.

...

**Yes, I am twisted and evil. Thank you.**

**Now, I know you found SOMETHING.**

**Hand it over...  
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	2. Chapter 2

**I know.**

**I suck.**

...

**I said it, okay?**

**...  
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**I will even admit that the only fact I finally posted this is because I am _whacked_ on cold medication right now and have the kind of fever that general _starts_ by me thinking Star Trek characters have appeared out of the woodwork and are talking to me**.** On the other hand, I don't seem likely to return to normalcy (i.e. doing my _job_ so I can become a successful comic artist and my scriptwriter won't garrote me with my own computer power cord) anytime soon, and so not only have another chapter nearly ready, but may even ACTUALLY WRITE _Where We've Been. _The prologue of which has been here for, like, a year. **

**Well. Let's not get _hasty..._**

"This is not going to work," Jeremy moaned at his evil twin in the mirror. The words came out, fortunately, heavily edited by his mouth, the original draft being something much closer to: "Please god, please god, I know I've never really prayed or believed in you or anything but still, please do not fucking let this work, because I may have to kill myself."

That would have just been embarrassing. There was, admittedly, no one in the bathroom to hear him except his own reflection, but, given the circumstances, that wasn't really very reassuring.

His reflection, however, was hard at work, and did not seem to be very interested in the interruption. "Shut up, Jer," he felt, and then heard, his own mouth say, as his hands continued doing fuck knew what with various frightening bottles they had dragged out of the back of Jenna and Elena's parts of the cabinets. "I'm busy. Don't you _ever_ wash your face?"

"When I shower, yeah, I guess," he thought, perplexed. Even if no one was present, it was probably better to appear to be holding a conversation with an invisible entity than to be conversing with yourself. And that meant he had to be the one to shut it, as Vicki wouldn't stop talking.

"Seriously, this is…kind of icky," she said, as Jeremy resigned himself to watching his reflection give its face a thorough scrubbing. "I always knew you looked like a lost puppy, but I'd have thought better of this if I knew you actually _smelled_ like one."

"So why don't," Jeremy suggested, with patience he thought would be worthy of any number of saints, "you think better of it, _now_? And how can you smell anything? You're a ghost."

"Not anymore, I'm not, and that's very hurtful of you, reminding me like that. Anyway." In the mirror his face morphed into Vicki's familiar toothy grin as she cheered suddenly, and Jeremy flinched. "I have your nose now, I can smell plenty. Plenty of you, to be specific."

He tried to pretend he hadn't been startled, taking control of one hand again to wipe the creepy smile off his face. "I can't smell anything. And don't do that—ah, fuck, that hurts!"

"I know," she said happily. "Your pores are terrible. You should be grateful to me for this, by the way. When I'm done we will be much, much prettier." And Jeremy watched in horror as he blew a kiss into to mirror.

"Vicki—you had better not put makeup on me, you know—come on, this is stupid, this isn't going to happen. Even if—" he swallowed hard, and tried not to think about it, "—you're right, about….It isn't going to happen, because first of all he doesn't like me, and second….If…he does, then why are you bothering to do this? I smell like a guy. You think…that Tyler likes guys. Why are you trying to make me smell like my Aunt Jenna?"

"First of all," Vicki commented, "this is Elena's. Points to that girl by the way, I like it. Very foxy. Second, I don't _think_ things, Jeremy Gilbert—I heard you think that and no, not _obviously_—I _know_ things. And Tyler will screw anything that moves, you know that."

"Except you, apparently," Jeremy muttered.

"Oh fuck you, Jer. And yeah, not me. Because yeah, my boy likes guys." She rinsed his face of for what felt like the twentieth time and turned her attention to his hair, which was uncomfortable at the unfamiliar experience of being touched, or even looked at with any force. It tried to shrink away, and so did Jeremy.

"I—"

"Oh, what, Jeremy? The word _gay_ giving you some trouble there, sweetie? _Boys_."

Jeremy curled his toes in the bathroom carpet, wishing his hands could be his again so he could tuck them safely in his pockets-wishing that he even had pockets in which they could be tucked, or anything else to offer a shred of comfort and concealment to him. But Vicky had taken all of that away, and Jeremy found himself pining desperately. He missed his hoodie. He missed his black. He missed his clothes, period, because Vicki was currently wearing him and his pajama bottoms and nothing else.

He missed his bed, and _normal_ life, life that just like all of his sweatshirts was a very convenient way of hiding. No, he didn't want to be thinking about this, about the idea that Tyler might be…well. He didn't like thinking about Tyler period, really, but especially not this. Jeremy curled his toes again and knew that he was pouting, just a little. He didn't like thinking that there was anything more than the four or five facts he knew about Tyler. Wondering, questioning like this—_really? Could he actually be…_—without any way of really knowing made him uncomfortable and fidgety. He kept giving up on the unsolvable question and simply wondering about Tyler, whether the person he _thought_, no, he was certain—he had been—he knew matched up with what he was being asked to believe. He found himself trying to picture Tyler, wondering where he was, or what he was doing.

And that was something Jeremy had promised himself he wouldn't do. He didn't need to think too much about idiot, _popular_ guys like Tyler, who where so far removed from his life that the miles between their houses, and the twenty feet between their lockers on the Science Hallway, might as well be the distance to the moon.

He knew that.

"So what's the plan?" he asked a bit too loudly, distracting himself.

Vicki was pleased as peaches. "Jeremy, I am so glad you're getting into the spirit of things! Took you long enough."

"Oh god," Jeremy said, wishing yet again that he was slightly better at deciding what to say. That had not been the best choice, had it. Still, he supposed he ought to know.

And there was a sort of horrible fascination to all this, he had to admit, as he watched Vicki finish up in the bathroom and head back, chattering merrily, to his bedroom to pillage his closet and make fun of all his clothes before finding ones she approved of. It really was like watching a movie, or more like watching someone else play a videogame in which you happened to be one of the highly combustible little army vehicles. Bad things were going to happen, almost certainly bad, frightening, and incredibly embarrassing things. And they would happen, without a doubt, to him. But none of it would be his fault, and, in a way, he wouldn't have to deal with any of it either.

In the last half hour or so, watching Vicki's alchemical but undeniable helpful wash-up in the bathroom and her hunt for the only pair of jeans he had that didn't bag and a long-sleeved red t-shirt he would never now, given its color, admit was very comfy, he had come to a kind of acceptance. Whatever happened from here on in, Jeremy was fairly certain, he wasn't going to get his body back. In a way, it was a relief.

Vicki was piloting now, and doing it at least more enthusiastically than he ever had. She had goals and ideas and a sheer love for life than made Jeremy sad, even as he found himself feeling nearly happy for her, because really, she should have been the one alive, and he should be dead. He almost was, now. And that seemed perfectly fitting.

He sat back and let Vicki have the reigns, and grudgingly admired her handiwork. He only absorbed bits of what she was saying, but it wasn't very important, and anyway, the gist of it was, Vicki Donovan had a plan.

It involved a party.

…

"Bye, Aunt Jenna."

"Goodbye, Jeremy. Don't be out too late."

"Don't worry, I won't be," Vicki called as they left, and then rubbed her hands together. "Oh, we won't be. We aren't going to be coming back here for a while."

"With any luck," Jeremy thought as he hurried down the porch steps, his nervousness returning at simply hearing Jenna's voice from the living room. He didn't want to run into her, not like this, though he was certain he would have to do it eventually. The longer that could be held off, well, the better.

"Oh, _Jeremy," _Vicki crooned, lifting their hands up towards the swath of early stars over the street. "What have I told you? We don't need luck. You've got me."

…

**This is not an evil cliffhanger. (Again.) This is me sparing you the pain of reading what _was_ going to be the next scene until such time as it is fit for human consumption, or I've had enough Dayquil that I can't tell the difference. **

**I'll ask Sulu to proofread it for me, how bout that?  
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	3. Chapter 3

**ta.**

**Oh, by the way, if people want to hear from a particular character's POV, or have some other request, I will try to oblige you.  
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…

Tyler was trying to remember why he went to so many parties. Ostensibly, he knew—or would have known if the use of that word wouldn't send him into the panic of those who know that someone is trying to make them look stupid, and also know they are too stupid to find an escape route—it was because they were fun.

And that worked, because they were fun, except for all the times when they also really sucked. Oddly, the times when they sucked the most were when everyone else was most enjoying them. That was when the people around him had all realized what they wanted to spend the evening doing, and it rarely involved Tyler.

Even when it did, on some level, include Tyler, he was perfectly aware that the only requirement he'd fulfilled was being semi-upright and probably breathing. His friends would unsurprisingly take sex over hanging with him and so stuck around only when the party was unexpectedly sparse of drunken females, talking about the kind of things that you talked about when drunk, regardless of whether the listener was your friend, some freshie geek, or the host's living room wall.

The drunken females he spent time with…well, the girls Tyler messed around with at parties wanted sex more than they particularly wanted sex with Tyler, so while the requirement of having a dick, or at least a working pair of hands and mouth, was slightly more specific, it was hardly discriminating. And it only made him feel falser, when he fucked around with them anyway, that he didn't even really want to be with them himself. At least if he'd wanted it, he thought, or even had wanted one of the girls to like him, despite the obvious fact they never would, he'd feel a bit less pointless about it.

But he didn't even care, and sometimes he thought about changing that, but he wasn't sure he would even if he knew how.

So he wandered instead, telling himself that each footstep was a stride of his afternoon runs, in the hope that he might be able to summon half the focus that he could pour into exercise for having fun. When he was a little bit drunker, he told himself stories instead, looking at a stranger's hanging pictures or the titles of books on the shelves. Sometimes they were happy stories, about little children running on beaches, jumping in their mothers' arms. Sometimes he found a gap from picture to picture—the mother missing, suddenly, wasting away in the years between the moments that a camera captured. Or perhaps she ran away, with the family dentist, to California—or the father couldn't keep his hands where they belonged. Maybe because.

He was doing it now, somewhere on the darkened second floor of a house he thought belonged to some kid who kept failing to make varsity, guessing at the relative who seemed so enamored of crystal squirrel knickknacks. They were everywhere on bookshelves lining the hallway, not in huge numbers, but covertly, one placed demurely between two books, another peeking over the top of the next shelf along, and they glittered like the ghosts of a winter woodland in the shadows. Massed, the effect was one of imminent sparkling ambush, and it was making him more than a little nervous. It was hard to imagine anyone actually liking the creatures that much, and Tyler decided that intimidation had probably been the perpetrator's intention, or at least annoyance. Given what he knew of the varsity wannabe—and the things he could still hear taking place downstairs—he could certainly understand an elderly relative's desire to make him and his equally noxious parents as uncomfortable as possible.

It was the closest Tyler ever came to wondering about other people, these days. But it was different, really, because Tyler never asked questions about the lives around him. He just told stories, the same way he always told himself things, the way he had told himself years ago to stop questioning things. You were safe with what you knew, and maybe once he had thought that there might be more things in life that were worth thinking over, but he'd learned enough from that slip-up. He'd learned that learning hurt.

Tyler shook his head, hard, which failed to knock the thoughts from his brain but stirred the alcohol in there enough that dizzy bubbles rose around him, and he felt about for somewhere to sit down.

There was a narrow couch against the shadowed wall and he grabbed onto the arm of it in relief.

It was with slightly less relief that he grabbed onto the arm of the boy who was revealed to be sitting in the space, a foot or two to the right of the couch arm, where he had actually succeeded in grabbing. That he did with a sound rather like "eurgh," and then, "Fuck," and then, "Oh. Um. Sorry."

"It's…fine," the other boy, who still appeared to be a part of the upholstery but probably wasn't, given that he was talking. He sounded rather doubtful himself, actually. "Are you alright?" he added, sounding suddenly much more confident—and concerned.

It flashed through Tyler's mind, as he wobbled to a stop, to wonder about two things. That tone was the first—it wasn't worry, but concern leavened with the absolute certainty that whatever problem Tyler owned to, the boy would be able to do something about it. It was the kind of tone that took everything away, telling you to simply sit quietly while it fixed everything for you. And Tyler knew—_knew—_that it would plant a kiss on your bandaged finger when it was done.

The other thing that occurred to him was that he had absolutely no idea who the kid was.

"Uh, yeah," he said, not really paying attention. "Um, can I sit down?"

Obligingly, the shadow shape moved over towards the arm of the couch, where the light revealed it to indeed be a boy, with floppy, ordinary-ish brown hair and a friendly expression. The open, puppy-like expression, in fact, was enough for Tyler to suspect that the boy was also not very intelligent—something that he disproved as Tyler lowered himself onto the freed spot, by flashing a bright, almost impish grin, of the kind that said its wearer had a master plan for everything, and wouldn't you like to know it. It seemed completely out of place with his quiet appearance, and Tyler found the contradiction oddly fascinating.

He blinked. Even without much light to see by, for a moment he had caught a glimmer that his instincts insisted was equal intensity in those dark eyes as the other boy had looked at Tyler. And Tyler, in the instant before he shut his eyes and swept away the image—or maybe the boy blinked too, while he couldn't see, and that was what shuttered the little light—was wrapped up by the thought that maybe that meant he was part of this kid's plan, too, even in some microscopic way.

Even afterwards, he still half hoped that it was true. Perhaps archea didn't affect the outcome of an enterprise, but there was still comfort in knowing that you were being observed and counted, and accounted for.

He didn't remember who he'd heard that from, but he was pretty sure he hadn't thought of it. He wasn't certain exactly what it meant, for one thing, although that didn't really mean much. Or at least, he wasn't sure quite what it meant in words, but it had obviously stuck with him all the same.

"Who're you?" he asked, rushing out sounds probably too quickly because it felt, at least, like he'd been sitting there and thinking for too long. It came out awkwardly; not just the suddenness but the sounds themselves, because really, Tyler, weren't there better ways to greet people? He asked the same _idea_ every day and didn't sound so brain-dead—or so drunk, even when he was usually drunker than this—and yet he couldn't remember exactly how he did it.

There was a little pause, and then the boy laughed, almost as though he'd had a bet on with himself, and had just won. But whatever he had called, it seemed as though he was morbidly pleased at being right about something he hadn't wanted.

And then, maybe, he saw the up-side; the laughter turned sweet.

"Jeremy," he said. "I'm Jeremy." They were sitting close enough that Tyler could examine his face, and it wasn't familiar, no matter how many times he tried to make it be, but the way he said it made it clear that Tyler should know him. Or, he realized, that Jeremy knew _him_, and the bet was that Tyler didn't.

"Sorry," he said, because he somehow did feel bad about not knowing when the kid was looking at him like that, which was odd, because Jeremy was actually looking rather benevolently amused.

"I'm kind of an oblivious asshole," he added, because first off it was true, and his friends and his attitude were annoying him enough right then, halfway through another drunken party at which each person was too self-centered to notice the same flaw in all of their neighbors, that he didn't think much of admitting it.

To his surprise, Jeremy choked on another laugh. "At least you didn't try to pretend that you remembered once you heard my name," he commented, and Tyler smiled too.

Because, yeah, that had been another option he'd considered. A good old stand-by, actually.

He looked down at his legs, outlines in the half-darkness, and still sending messages that it would be in his interest not to bother trying to stand. Jeremy's knee, deep indigo colored, was settled just against his thigh, below a series of penny sized holes that had worn into the fabric until it was white. They always made him think of the furthest constellations, so impossible and yet so mundane in each night's sky.

He couldn't work out if it was weird that he was noticing something that he wouldn't usually, or weird that he wasn't minding something that he possibly should. After a moment he gave up, because either way, he didn't mind the contact, so it could well be that he simply never noticed how close he sat to people.

When Jeremy asked, "Are you sure you're okay?"—still sounding more amused than anything—Tyler realized he might have been out too long.

"How many times have you asked?" he said, still a little vaguely.

Jeremy grinned. "Just now and before," he said. "Otherwise I'd be more worried."


	4. Chapter 4

**I just heard an ad on Pandora for whipped-cream-flavored vodka. _What?_**

Vicki didn't do a lot of talking, which was the good part. She'd gotten quieter and quieter as they approached the house, and once they were inside she simply plowed through the crowd of dancers, something that took Jeremy a little by surprise. Vicki had adored dancing, once. He'd simply assumed it would be on her list of things to do now that she had the chance too, especially if she had seduction on her mind. She might, after all, be in his uncoordinated body, but he was certain that that, of all things, wouldn't get in her way.

Though, come to think, of it, he didn't know if he would be bad at dancing. The odds were certainly high, but it wasn't like he'd ever tried it before. He hadn't tried a lot of things—or, a lot of things that involved other people—and so no one that they passed knew him well enough to recognize him as the outsider that he was.

Instead Vicki sailed them straight up the stares with an air of such focus and determination that Jeremy experienced for the first time the little inner thrill of watching people move out of his way. He didn't let Vicki pick up on it, though. And he didn't give in to the urge to ask her what on earth they were doing, as she strode up the stairs and settled on a coach placed at the shadowy end of a corridor that was about as far from the rest of the party as it was possible to be.

And then they sat there.

"Vicki," he thought, after a reasonable time had passed. "What on earth are we doing?"

"Hush," she said out loud, and then thought. "I'm trying to listen."

"For what?"

"For somebody to come by who, I don't know, _isn't_ you? Why exactly would I tell you that I'm listening, Jeremy, if I wanted you to talk? I wouldn't. So I don't."

Jeremy glowered at the nearest shadowy wall. "Excuse me. I just thought you might be half as bored as I am."

"Jeremy, it's been about a minute."

"And I'm bored." He wasn't, actually. He was hyped up and twitchy, and wanted this to be _over_, because yes, he'd agreed to let her do this to him, but that didn't mean he liked it. Jeremy didn't like waiting for things, and especially not the bad ones. That was why he took drugs, goddamn it.

Had.

Hell.

One good thing about Vicki; she couldn't keep quiet once you got her started. "Since when are you the one with the micropatience?" she asked him, tapping her fingers on the rough cord surface of the couch. She kept his eyes fixed on the other end of the hall, where the stairs were, and he thought that she was watching for something, but it was dark enough he had trouble imagining what she expected to see. He wasn't certain, either, how much she actually needed to use his eyes to see.

"'Micropatience?'"

"That's what you call it."

"When it's _you_, yeah, doing that stupid thing you do wh—"

"Hush!"

"Stop saying 'hush' out loud!"

"Stop..._thinking_ at me for a minute!"

Jeremy, generously, waited almost thirty seconds before he asked, "What is it?"

He could feel Vicki counting, slowly, to ten.

"Do you have any idea," she asked him, "how much you sound like a ten year-old girl right now?"

"I do not!"

"Yes you do. Like one of those girls in those vampire movies that you love—"

"Helen Chandler is not ten years old!"

"Fuck, Jeremy, be quiet!"

"Sorry."

"Good. Wat, what?"

And Jeremy decided then and there that, whatever Vicki said, he deserved a goddamn award for _not_ screaming like a girl, which might make up at least a little bit for all the credit that he lost for not noticing that someone had almost fallen on top of him.

"It's fine," he said, when he had pulled himself together again. "Um."

Looking up into Tyler Lockwood's face, as familiar and alien as the surface of that damn moon, he searched for anything at all to say, and came up with Vicki.

He let her take over for the time being.

…

The worst thing, Jeremy decided, was that he and Vicki still had horribly similar senses of humor.

He could feel every time she made him laugh, but he could feel, too, each time that the action was completely unconscious on her part. During those moments, when no actual _order_ was twitching through his limbs, it was hard to remember that the laughter still wasn't coming from him, because he wanted to laugh, too.

He had thought that he would hate when she made him do things he didn't want to; he hadn't thought how it would feel if he did. It was…well, it was creepy. It made it hard to remember that it wasn't really him laughing, and Jeremy might have been willing to put up with being a puppet, but that depended entirely on his remaining aware of the situation. If he forgot he wasn't in control, it would only hurt him more when Vicki forced him to remember.

A good part of the problem, too, he thought, rested with Tyler. He _was_ funny—in his big, dumb, thoughtlessly vindictive way. Jeremy could remember that he had thought exactly the same thing at the age of seven, when Elena, acting under the influences that possessed eight year-old girls from time to time and which Jeremy was sure came from a signaling tower on Jupiter, had invited all of Mystic Elementary's soccer team to her birthday party. Tyler had stolen Jeremy's stuffed donkey, Wallace, and instead of simply destroying her, as all the other boys had idly urged him to, spent the next half an hour puppetting the toy around the room, speaking for her in a perfect, braying voice and keeping her always just out of Jeremy's reach. Even at the time, Jeremy recalled, as he'd rubbed away his tears he had thought Tyler/Wallace's comments were hilarious.

Come to think of it, he'd learned most of the curse words that he now knew from that party. And later used most of them on himself, in one way or another.

Because what did that say about him, that he not only let people bully him, but actually saw the _good parts_ of it? He wasn't just incapable of standing up for himself, he was the kind of person who sat down to let other people take his place. At the age of seven Jeremy hadn't known the word apologist, but he'd figured out a lot about the meaning of it that day.

It pissed Jeremy off to face the fact that neither of them had really changed. Tyler was still hopelessly self-confident, and had a memory that Jeremy would accuse of having more holes than his great-grandmother's had, if he weren't sure that things and people like him simply didn't count. They didn't fit in Tyler's mind well enough for storage to be an issue. Even at Elena's party, Tyler hadn't bothered to notice Jeremy's name.

And he still had that way of saying things that were just so goddamn perfect, so honest and so different from the lies that Jeremy expected, that Jeremy had trouble remembering that honesty itself wasn't a virtue, because you didn't have to lie to wound. It was just what most people chose to do.

Jeremy kept that awareness of his own weakness at the fore of his mind, partly to fortify himself and partly to prevent himself from thinking any further into his own faults where Vicki could pick up on them.

But Vicki—oh, Vicki was busy laughing, and not a shred of guilt for it, because after all, it wasn't Vicki's insignificance that Tyler was acknowledging. And maybe it was Vicki who Tyler was undervaluing by the assumption that he could, as he currently was, use her as a pillow and willing, silent companion on his drunken rambles—but then, Vicki showed absolutely no signs of caring.

Vicki was a skank.

And Tyler loved it, Jeremy could tell. Despite his protestations of sobriety—and Jeremy would admit he was far more intelligible than was to be expected, given the number of beers he'd probably consumed by now—he didn't seem able or willing to stand again, and in fact had drifted sideways, until he wasn't so much sitting next to Jeremy as he was draped across his shoulder.

And he wouldn't stop talking.

'Intelligible' was perhaps a questionable word. 'Articulate' might well be better, because while Jeremy could understand all of the words, the greater meaning to them completely passed him by. It wasn't just the story-something about squirrels, he was pretty sure: he had a feeling, too, that what was being said, and even this whole moment, had a significance that he had no way of understanding. Jeremy hated that. It reminded him of listening to someone else in the middle of their trip, when the whole universe made sense to them and he knew it did but couldn't possibly connect. He'd quit because he wanted to stop feeling that way, and now here he was again. It occurred to him to wonder, briefly, if Tyler was on anything but attitude and beer right now, but he dismissed it fairly quickly. The idea just didn't fit with anything he knew about the guy, which admittedly wasn't much.

Besides that he was heavy, when he chose to drape himself on somebody, and disgustingly popular, and warm.

It took him by complete surprise when breath that only smelled a little bit like beer tickled against his ear. "I'm sorry I'm boring you," Tyler said, remarkably matter-of-fact for someone who had his head pretty much on Jeremy's shoulder.

Vicki hurried to reassure him that he wasn't, and Jeremy wanted to argue with her because Tyler was right—he wasn't making much sense, and Jeremy wasn't listening. That didn't mean he wanted Tyler to stop talking, or to go; it was just a fact, and Jeremy thought that maybe Tyler got that, but he didn't have a chance to find out. Maybe that was a good thing: he wasn't not the one who was supposed to interact with Tyler, after all, and that'd be easier if he didn't learn that Tyler agreed with him about anything that mattered.

But Tyler didn't pay much account to Vicki, just looked at them for a moment, and shook his head. "Nah," he said. "I am." And Jeremy wondered whether he meant he was boring him, or if he meant he was sorry. Maybe it was just a statement of the facts of the universe.

Later he'd wish to the depths of his probably nonexistent soul that he had been paying better attention. Vicki was there, after all, undead proof that there was something more than he'd thought to the world, so maybe he did have a soul, and there was a god, and he'd listen to Jeremy's prayers and take him back to the moment when Vicki _wasn't_ there, when she sat silenced for a heartbeat by the desperate weight of a love that had spent to many years unspoken, and so Jeremy spoke instead. He didn't realize he had asked his question until he heard Tyler laugh.

"Yeah," he said, smiling in a way that reminded Jeremy exactly why people liked Tyler and no one liked him, because they were both sort of jerks but Jeremy definitely couldn't smile like that. "Yeah, I guess that I am. Oh, fuck. That doesn't mean anything, does it?"

"Nah," Jeremy told him. "It doesn't, really."

Tyler leaned back into the couch, still smiling as he searched the ceiling for an answer. "Guess I meant the first one," he said. "But really I meant all three. Right?"

"Right," said Jeremy, and when Tyler looked down at him again, the shift knocked his knee into Jeremy's, and Jeremy kneed him back. They both laughed about it, and in his head Jeremy tried to wrap the sound of that laugh up in patterned paper and give Vicki the present she deserved.

It didn't nearly cover the debt he owed her, but for the moment, it was the best that he could do.

The feeling of pleasure that he discovered in making someone who ought to dislike him laugh that way—that part he kept for himself, because if the best he could were good enough he wouldn't be a drug addict, and neither Vicki nor his sisters would be dead.


	5. Chapter 5

**We have reached the darksome hinting part of this story-okay, we kind of did that last time, and maybe in the first chapter, and oh, whatever. But still, I am trying to give you bits of all of the important things before you find out what really happened/s, mostly because I know that you will try to speculate and it will drive you insane. You're welcome.  
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**...Although no, I haven't decided if he's a werewolf or not in this yet. Why would I do that?**

**If you have an opinion (on anything!), do please review and tell me about it.**

**Please. For the love of God. Who I actually don't love all that much. I mean, we get along, we're friends, but he's not the kind of deity you can really get down and party with, you know?. Buddha, maybe-he's a fun guy-but not so much God. But I do love you! And I will love you even more if you give me comments! Go look at my profile picture. See? Kisses! Kisses for you if you give me reviews because seriously, I am shameless, and you people only seem to listen to me if I completely embarrass myself first which, okay, I understand because at least I am amusing you and like I said I'm without shame. But you're still jerks, you know-mainly because you don't acctually read these amusing little author's notes I spend so long (not) composing. **

**...  
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Tyler wasn't sure how the minutes, and then hours, that passed while he sat there had somehow managed to be completely different from what he thought he knew as time. Time pissed Tyler off. It always did; he had no patience and he knew it, and even when he got what he wanted he had the attention span of the average seven year-old. Yet

Tyler was pretty sure he'd never made a friend before. He had them, yeah, and even some damn good ones in the mix, who generally made up for the bastards, and sometimes even made up for him. But most of them belonged to a network he had been born into; like the house he'd been brought up in, there were the boys who lived along the same road, and went to the same school, and there had never been a time before they were friends. Some of them had been new when he started high school—or like Matt, who moved in in sophomore year—but even then, they had just passed in the halls, or shaken hands the first day of football practice, and…yeah. Friends.

It had never occurred to Tyler before that maybe a friendship that mattered more would be one of the kind that _wasn't_ a certain bet. Talking to this kid felt like a job interview, it felt like _work_, and yet he found that he cared about the outcome. He wanted quiet, unexpectedly confident, weirdly insightful Jeremy to like him. Maybe later, he thought, he would ask exactly why that was; and the thing was, he was pretty sure that Jeremy would have the answer, so maybe that was why.

Or maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe this was the good side to being drunk that everyone had always told him about—usually it just made him morbid.

That made Jeremy laugh, and Tyler added it to the growing list of things to do or say more often, because they made Jeremy laugh. "Really," he commented. "I never would have guessed."

"Yeah," Tyler admitted. "Yeah, I am, kinda. I'm weird right now. And I think I'm going to be sick."

Jeremy waited, politely. "Are you going to?" he asked after a minute.

Tyler considered. "Huh. Maybe…I guess not."

Jeremy nodded in acceptance, and then shifted his seat on the couch. "So, I don't want to be moving, or anything…"

"No!" Tyler threw a play punch at him—or, well, somewhere near where he was—and Jeremy ducked and countered, snickering. They messed around, trying to push each other onto smaller portions of the couch, and Tyler allowed Jeremy to entertain the notion that he was actually winning for a minute or two, before using his weight advantage to simply flatten Jeremy into one of the couch's arms.

"Alright, alright, for Christ's sake," Jeremy managed to squeeze out. "I'm not going anywhere. Apparently."

Tyler reduced the pressure a little and Jeremy shifted, until somehow without Tyler entirely noticing he ended up with his head on Jeremy's knees as Jeremy sat with his feet tucked up against him. "Better?" Jeremy asked, and Tyler closed his eyes and nodded, feeling denim against his cheek and warmth welling up from the flesh and bone beneath.

He figured that he fell asleep there, or maybe he just kept on talking, telling this random stranger his thoughts on nothing in particular and everything at all. It was hard to tell, hard to work out, later, whether he'd dreamed about the next half hour, or if it had just felt like some comfortable, private dream. Either way, at about two in the morning Jeremy shook his shoulder gently, and suggested that they probably ought to be heading home.

Tyler started, and remembered, somewhat unwillingly, about his mother's Friday night binge that would bring her home in about an hour, just sober enough to lecture him if he wasn't in bed already.

"Yeah," he said, and found that he almost had trouble getting the word out. "I should probably get home, soon." He paused. "Could—"

"Yeah, okay," Jeremy reassured him, standing first to pull him upright. "You got a way of getting home?"

Tyler resisted the urge to roll his eyes. It was something about the way that Jeremy always seemed to know the answer when he said things like that that both made them sound so maternally authoritative and at the same time prevented them from being annoying.

"I can walk."

"You sure about that?"

"Fuck you, you know?" Jeremy snickered, and Tyler reconsidered the wisdom of punching someone who was still half-supporting and half guiding him down the darkened hallway. Jeremy only ducked when attacked, and the movement had sent a storm of inebriated butterflies flapping wildly towards safe haven in his stomach. Still, he thought, he liked that Jeremy wasn't the kind of guy who tried to take any blow that was aimed at him, even play ones, just to show that he could.

Basically, Tyler liked that Jeremy wasn't him, because he sure wouldn't be helping someone like him down the stairs, which this house had far, far too many of, in his opinion.

"Yes, and that's where you're missing out, see," Jeremy told him. "This is exactly what guys like me do for fun, cause then I get to see you trying to walk down these stairs—which, believe me, is pretty fun."

Tyler had to admit, he probably had a point there. "Guys like you? Like, geeks?"

Jeremy nodded. "And sadistic bastards in general. But they're usually the same thing." He stepped onto the floor at the bottom first, and when Tyler followed his arm was there for him to grab onto, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Not _like_ anything; it was.

He could see that Jeremy was scoping out the downstairs, now; his eyes drifted between the various chairs where sleepers were strewn, and the others who were still making an attempt at partying, visible through a few doorways they passed. He didn't say anything about how Tyler should have been staying with them, not hanging onto some geek, but Tyler was pretty sure he thought about it, in the matter-of-fact way that Jeremy seemed to think about things like that. It was obvious his feelings wouldn't be hurt if Tyler did go back to them, but still, Tyler was glad that he didn't ask about it, because Tyler wasn't sure how he would explain why he wasn't going to.

At the door they separated so Tyler could grab his jacket from the table where he'd dumped it; when he came back, Jeremy was still standing there, his hands in his pockets.

"Don't you have a coat, or something?" Tyler asked him, as it somehow didn't feel fair that Jeremy could look after him but didn't have to do the same thing for himself. Jeremy just shrugged.

"I have lots of things."

"You're an asshole."

"If you want. Come on, let's get out of here. This house gets on my nerves. Anyone who decorates like that must really be an asshole."

Tyler wouldn't argue with that, and Jeremy laughed at him as they stepped out into the night. "Squirrels?"

"They were...oh, shut up."

A ghostly dust of snow was falling, every snowflake above them shining against the darkness like a star. Tyler tipped his head back as they walked down the drive to gaze upward, something inside him responding warmly to the knowledge that Jeremy was almost certainly doing the same thing, and even if he wasn't, and Tyler looked like an absolute idiot right now, Jeremy wouldn't care. He just kept walking, a steadfast red shape in the corner of Tyler's left eye, and let Tyler stare at the sky as long as he wanted.

Tyler wasn't sure what it was he loved about the sky, or when it had started. He loved the night sky best, the perfect blackness of it, and how you could see the air at night. Standing in the light from the house's windows and looking outward, the darkness wasn't just overhead but all around him, growing heavier and heavier into the distance, the way that visibility faded under water. On nights like this, especially, when Virginia was finally growing colder under December's loving touch and not a single cloud would show its face, he felt an awareness of the sheer space of the world, extending not only out to the side but also endlessly upwards, through the winter air. Even if he couldn't go there, thinking about it, feeling, in someway, that space around him, was just as good. Outside, at night, Tyler sometimes thought that he was nothing more than another area of the air, connected to all the others, and the feeling was one of the best that he knew.

Once they reached the main road Jeremy went one way and Tyler turned in the other. Neither of them said anything and Tyler appreciated it, but twenty yards along the road, he did turn to look back, reassured in some way but the solid shape of Jeremy, heading to some house Tyler had never seen where he had a warm bed and a family and all the other things that home meant, waiting. And although he didn't wait to see it, he was certain Jeremy looked back, too.

It wasn't a long walk home from the idiot's house—he'd never been there before, but he knew the road it was on, just at the edge of town, and sometimes when he wasn't tired enough added it onto his summer training runs. Soon enough he was on his own road, and then turning onto the stupid drive that took far too long to do something as simple as reach the front door.

His mother always said that they were beautiful gardens. He agreed, although very little, and certainly not his mother, would make him call something beautiful out loud. He didn't mind that they were there; he just wished that they weren't quite so blatantly designed to intimidate people, because all it took was five seconds with his family to work out they were all dicks; they didn't actually need to hang a sign that said so. As it was, the only thing that stopped them doing just that was that no Lockwood had yet managed to find a sign that was ostentatious enough, although they had certainly tried their bests.

He let himself in at the front door and looked around for someplace inconspicuous to place his coat, before deciding not to risk it and tucking it under his arm instead. He'd only have to collect it later anyway, because in his mother's mind there was no reason to clutter up the front hall with personal effects. Or anywhere else in the house, really. If he wasn't feeling particularly antagonistic—which, admittedly, he generally was—he'd do what he could to skip the lecture.

His room was at the end of the hall, and he was in the bathroom with the main light off by the time he heard the grumble of his mother's car in the drive.

God knew where his father was. Tyler realized he hadn't checked, and really hoped that his father hadn't either noticed Tyler's entrance, or decided to make this one of the nights when he and his wife had a "talk" in the front hall at Metallica concert volume.

Odds were he wasn't even home, though. Tyler finished brushing his teeth and snuck back towards his bed, pausing for a moment before he swung his feet up onto it to listen. There was the slow tap, tap, tap of high heels clicking up the front hall to the stairs. Then his mother must have slipped, or set her foot down on the first step badly. He heard the snap of the heel, the thud of her foot back on the floor and then an outburst of swearing that rose to a banshee shriek before the words tumbled away, forced out too quickly to be intelligible. They faded into quiet, and then a choked back little sob.

Sometimes Tyler wished he couldn't hear things quite so well.

He flopped back on his bed, looking up at the darkness of the ceiling as the house grew silent again, except for the whisper of the snow outside. But he couldn't find any stars there, so he rolled over onto his stomach, considering the blankets for a moment but not bothering to pull them over himself.

Alcohol always lost its warm glow in his stomach the moment that he got home.

Something about the knowing tone Jeremy had used came back to him, and Tyler wondered whether Jeremy really had known that he needed to get home by two thirty. The thought kicked something inside of him and he turned over onto his back again, shutting his eyes against the idea that a total stranger, his strange new friend, might have seen Carol Lockwood run her drunken circuit through the Grill a thousand times or more—because really, was there anyone in town who hadn't? He focused on counting slowly to ten, controlling the pace of his breath in and out and building walls around the sudden and familiar fear that had no particular name or basis.

He forced himself to fall asleep, feeling as distant in the darkness as he had the morning Sheriff Forbes called him to say that Vicki Donovan had killed herself the night before.

But he made himself promise, too, that the next he would find his new friend in town, and even if Jeremy decided that he didn't want him around, he would do anything that it took to make Jeremy like him for who he was, attitude and all. It would be a project, admittedly, but despite all the opportunities he'd had to practice, Tyler had never really learned how to give up.

**...**

**Kisses? I mean it.**


	6. Chapter 6

_**Fine**_**, darling. **_**Fine**_**. I will actually work on this. If I _have _to...(I'm kidding! I'm sorry! I'm serious!) **

**This is the longest chapter I've ever written for a fic, by the way.  
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**Note: this story is going to involve a lot of drug use and abuse, (more than I anticipated, so I'm reissuing the warning), and while I can promise that I know what I'm talking about and will try to present things accurately, the characters definitely **_**don't**_**. From this point on I'd like you to remember that you SHOULD NOT take Jeremy or Tyler's ideas about drugs or alcohol as facts, because they are willfully ignorant teenage drug abusers (and, while ANY teenager who drinks or does drugs is **_**legally**_** an abuser, however responsibly they do it…their behavior definitely deserves the term, whatever their age.)**

**Don't listen to what Vicki says about _anything_.  
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**...**

It almost seemed too easy, and he wasn't sure exactly why that was, because he didn't know why he thought it should be hard. It might have been because important things were supposed to be, but that opened the question of why, in his mind, this should be important, and he much preferred questions when they stayed closed.

Tyler picked the Grill to start searching because everybody went there, even strange freshman guys who didn't seem to have any friends. His guess turned out to be inaccurate but led him in the right direction, and he found Jeremy sitting on one of the benches along the green outside. He was pleased that he recognized him immediately—between darkness and alcohol Tyler had managed to forget plenty of faces: it had caused him quite a few problems, especially when the owner was female, and not the person that he had thought at the time. Fucking this up would feel a bit worse than a slap, he thought, or rather it would cost him something that might turn out to be good.

But the awkward way of sitting and the eyes that promised, even from a distance, to be sort of ridiculously large and brown were immediately recognizable, and Tyler crossed the road half a block up from him, feeling his mouth relaxing into a natural smile. He looked a bit different in the sunlight, but somehow the sight of him on the bench seemed familiar in its own right, and Tyler realized that he had almost certainly seen Jeremy here before without it ever making a conscious impact.

He rolled his eyes at himself. That certainly made sense—both because he _would_ do something like that, and because if Jeremy had guessed that Tyler hadn't noticed him outside a place Tyler frequented nearly every day, that would explain his attitude.

"Hey," Tyler said, somewhat awkwardly, when he was a few steps from the bench. Jeremy, who had been gazing in the other direction, snapped his head around so quickly that Tyler couldn't help but laugh, and after a minute Jeremy sighed and laughed with him. He had been sitting with one long leg pulled up almost against his chest so that when he turned his foot had slipped off of the bench, making him wobble. Once he had straightened himself out he smiled wryly up at Tyler, gesturing towards the space beside him.

Tyler circled around behind the bench and sat on its cast iron arm, setting one foot on the seat of the bench instead. The space next to Jeremy was kind of small, Jeremy himself being larger than Tyler thought that he remembered, and in any case he didn't plan on them being there too long. He didn't usually mind talking to someone seated next to him, but last night he had found that he liked being at a bit of an angle, so that he could Jeremy for reaction while he talked, and somehow that mattered more than the spatial concerns. "How are you?"

"Okay," Jeremy said, and smiled a bit more broadly, the way he did when he was about to tease. "You're the one I'd be worried about. Feeling okay today?"

Tyler laughed. He kind of liked the way that Jeremy's quiet, almost shy voice made his own uncharacteristic gentleness of tone sound appropriate. He liked listening to Jeremy, and so it made him happy, in an odd way, that he was starting to sound different himself. Not quite like Jeremy, maybe, but different. It was nice to know that it wasn't only the bad things that left a mark. "I don't get hangovers."

"Fuck." That made him snicker again, at the look of genuine appreciation on Jeremy's face. Jeremy's smiled brightened too, and they both laughed for a minute, before Jeremy's face made it clear he'd come up with a new comment. "Makes sense," he said, and ducked out of the way when Tyler swiped at him.

"What does that even mean?" he demanded, grinning.

"Dude, your blood alcohol must be permanently up there, if you're like last night all the time."

"I don't do that every night," Tyler protested, which only made Jeremy laugh louder. "Dude, shut _up_." He smacked at him and things quickly devolved into a poking match, both of them trying to be discreet and failing completely, from the looks that passersby gave them. Jeremy, who Tyler was beginning to suspect of being a right little bastard when he chose to, spotted an opening and tickled Tyler's side just below his ribs, nearly making him fall backwards off of the bench. Glowering, Tyler righted himself and took the first opportunity for revenge.

His fingers ghosted over Jeremy's stomach, making him giggle, and Tyler could feel the reverberations of it, Jeremy's muscles spasming under his touch. Something about it made his own stomach lurch, and he withdrew his hand as fast as he could, wondering if he was about to be sick. He'd been on edge all morning, and he'd thought it had been eagerness to get out of the house and go look for Jeremy. But Jeremy was found, now, and Tyler pushed away the thought that maybe that was exactly it.

He had left himself undefended while thinking, though, and he was brought back to the moment by the feeling of Jeremy's index finger drawing lightly down the delicate skin behind his left ear. Tyler swore, loudly, and laughed, and, giving up on talking there, pulled them both up off of the bench to head into the Grill for lunch, and the safety of a table in between them.

Jeremy came willingly enough, and once they were ensconced at a booth in the back he asked for and received a sandwich, which he began to eat while Tyler toyed with his fries. It wasn't that he wasn't hungry, but somehow even Grill hamburgers weren't as interesting as talking. That had never happened before.

After a minute he ate the fry, because he was starting to feel weird. "I'm really sorry about last night," he said.

Jeremy looked up. "Why? You didn't beat me up, or throw up on me or anything." He paused. "Wait, please tell me that you haven't forgotten it entirely and think that you actually did that?"

"Shut up," Tyler told him. "'Course not. I just…I wanted to thank you, you know. For being cool."

"So why not just do it?" Jeremy asked, tucking his fist under his chin and looking up at Tyler with a curiously honest intensity. Tyler was about to answer—though with what, he didn't know—but Jeremy suddenly looked away, seemingly embarrassed by what he had just said. A moment later he had straightened up again, and the familiar ironic smile had returned. "Anyway, of course I was cool. I'm always cool. Thanks for noticing."

Tyler laughed at him and ate a few more fries, wondering briefly whether Jeremy meant those words to sound as sad—and biting—as he thought they could be. The joking tone was perfect as always, but Tyler couldn't keep himself from reading something more into that smile. It pulled up merrily at one side, but the very corners were always turned just a little down, and sometimes Tyler thought that it was odd how Jeremy's teeth, revealed, were always tightly together. It didn't look faked, exactly, but it seemed to him it had been copied imperfectly, by someone who had to look at other people to figure out how to smile.

"Yeah, well," he said, shrugging, and took a bite of his hamburger, before setting it back down. "Wait, what's with that?"

"What?"

"Beating you up comes first on that list?"

Jeremy frowned at him. "Sometimes you make no sense."

"Shut up. Just now, when you were listing things at least I didn't do."

"Oh." Jeremy considered his sandwich for a minute, then raised a eyebrow at Tyler. "In case you hadn't guessed, it happens to me kind of a lot."

"Oh." Tyler couldn't really claim he hadn't figured that, because Jeremy had been hiding in a darkened hallway, and he both looked like a geek and talked like one. The effect was even stronger today, as Jeremy's hair was a bit out of order, and his ratty band T-shirt had a rather frightening man almost completely swathed in bandages. Tyler would bet a lot of money Jeremy had gotten it at a concert which he had waited months for, and that it hadn't been washed since then. Apparently, last night's ensemble represented all of the normal clothes he owned. "Why?"

Jeremy snorted. "Again, the obvious: I don't get along with people."

Tyler resisted the urge to ask, _what about me?_ "Don't you have friends, or something?"

"Something," Jeremy said immediately, and Tyler glowered at him. "No, I mean no, I don't. Not really." He didn't sound particularly bothered, and as he said it he looked up at Tyler again and smiled in a way that stopped him feeling sorry for Jeremy and, maybe, made Tyler think that sentence didn't apply to him. It felt like he was telling him a secret, letting him in on the joke that the world was stupid enough to see Jeremy so simply, and so wrong.

Tyler offered him a fry in silent thanks, and Jeremy took it. As he put in his mouth Tyler rubbed at his ear, and said quietly, "Me, too. Or, me neither, I guess."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Uh. I—" Tyler shook his head, wondering what had possessed him to say that. He was pretty sure he'd said the same sort of thing last night, or at least indicated it pretty clearly by his behavior, but neither of those things had led him towards what he wanted to both say and hide right now.

It had been months, now, since he had let himself think about Vicki. When he had gotten home the night before he'd felt the thought of her drifting around just beneath the surface, and the kind of pounding, sick headache that came with it, but sometime in the early hours he'd gotten out of bed to grab two Acetaminophen, and with the alcohol in his system he had slept without any dreams. He was pretty sure, now, with Jeremy sitting in front of him, that he was the one who had brought her to mind, but whether that was because he was somehow like her, or because being happy in a new way had brought the old guilt to mind, Tyler didn't know. He wanted to ask Jeremy, almost, but he found that he was terrified at the thought that Jeremy might not know. Part of that was because he was getting used to Jeremy seeming to just get him, without any trouble at all, and Tyler couldn't see how even he could understand how badly fucked up Tyler was over his girlfriend's death, when Tyler didn't get it himself.

He hadn't been in love with Vicki. Even at the time, he'd known that. It had been a given, because he'd never even thought about love, with any other girl. But in a weird way, he had liked her: the kind of way he almost never felt. He'd been happy around her. She'd been close to being his best, and only, friend.

Afterwards, and even on the very first morning, when Sheriff Forbes had knocked on the front door, he'd felt guilty over that, because he really ought to care about his girlfriend for deeper reasons than the way she looked almost weightless when she danced, and how she didn't mind that he didn't like to talk. Tyler had liked her, but once she was dead he searched for things that he actually knew about her and came up with nothing, and it sucked, it really did, that that was all that Vicki had got out of her life, and all he had gotten from her. He might not have been the one who killed her, and he probably wasn't the reason she made her choice, but he sometimes thought that he had had a chance to be the reason that she didn't.

Instead he had just fucked it all up, because he didn't know what else to do.

"What's the shirt?" he asked instead, and tried to make his voice say that he was sorry, because even as he realized he couldn't do it he wanted to explain. He wanted to promise that he would tell Jeremy all of it someday, because Tyler thought that he wanted Jeremy to know that stuff about, because he didn't want the two of them to go the same way.

He wanted to have the promise of someday.

Jeremy startled, obviously not expecting that particular turn. But he didn't seem surprised Tyler had changed the subject, and he didn't seem to mind it either. "It's a band," he said, looking down at it as though he needed to affirm this.

"I can tell." Tyler, relieved, set his chin on his fist and smiled.

"No, I mean…oh, fuck you. Yes, they're a band. I like them. They're metal," he added, decisively.

Tyler raised an eyebrow. "Screamo?"

"Christian."

"You're kidding me."

Jeremy shrugged. "_Heavy_ metal Christian," he said, as if that made it tolerable.

"Are you?"

"God, no," Jeremy said, and when Tyler laughed loudly enough to annoy the neighboring tables he smiled. "I suppose I should have said fuck, shouldn't I?" He waved at the lady sitting diagonally from them. "Hello, Mrs. Baxter. Oh, shut up, you. They're _totally_ looking at you. "

Tyler just shook his head, unable to speak until he got his sniggering under control.

Jeremy stole a fry off of his plate in the meantime, and crunched on it, consideringly. "So….Anyway, no, I am not, and if there's a God I'm sure he's releaved. Father Kerry certainly was when I stopped going to church." He took another bite and then stopped, looking at the remnant of potato in his hand. When he spoke again, it was in a very different tone. "Caroline was, though. She liked that I listened to them—or, liked it better, anyway. She's the one who got it for me."

"Who's Caroline?" Tyler asked, frowning. Jeremy was biting at his lower lip, and the suddenly corners of his mouth were completely turned down now, without any pretense at smiling.

"She's my sister," Jeremy muttered, eyes fixed on his plate as though there was some childhood nightmare reflected in the white china, and he couldn't look away. Tyler frowned at him, and after a moment Jeremy spoke again. "And the apostrophe S….That stands for 'was'," he said, very softly. "She's dead."

In Tyler's mind, everything seemed to freeze. On the last words Jeremy had lifted his eyes to meet Tyler's gaze, and was looking evenly back at him, head tilted just a little to the side. The whole world seemed like it could be reflected in those eyes, Tyler thought, but Jeremy was looking at him, _watching_ him, as if waiting for his reaction, as if nothing could possibly be more fascinating. Nothing about his face spoke immediately of sadness, and it made Tyler think of some sculpture or painted mask, smooth and set like white marble.

But there was a spark in it, too, behind his eyes, that living, active interest as he watched Tyler, that melted that frozen image, and that was what Tyler found he couldn't look away from. It turned Jeremy's eyes from gentle brown to chocolate colored, deep and dark and fascinating.

Tyler noticed that there were tiny tears in the corners of them.

"Oh," Tyler said.

Jeremy blinked. The shine of tears was gone, if it had ever been there, brushed away onto Jeremy's lashes. "Yeah," he said. "Thank you."

Tyler nodded, glad and somehow disappointed that he hadn't had to say that he was sorry for it to be understood. He'd wanted to say it, somehow. He'd wanted to do something to make those tears go away, but it seemed he didn't need to.

He didn't like not being needed. Or maybe it was more that he wished that he were.

"Are you going to eat that?" Jeremy asked him.

"What?"

He rolled his eyes at him, and however it had happened Tyler was glad to see him revived. "Food. You do know what to do with it, right? Open mouth—"

"Oh, shut up," Tyler snapped. "We were talking."

"You can't eat and talk at the same time?"

"Not if you have manners, no."

Jeremy laughed aloud. "You have manners? Really?"

"A couple." Tyler shrugged, and found that he felt comfortable smiling once more. It was hard to resist joining in when Jeremy was happy, and, apparently, the cloud had passed for now. "You haven't been eating either."

"I have."

"Not your food."

"What, these aren't mine?"

"Not before you stole them."

"Well," Jeremy said. "Whataya know."

Tyler snickered at him.

"I was delaying," Jeremy said, with plain faced honesty.

Tyler looked at him. "So was I."

Any earlier disappointment was made up for by the way that made Jeremy smile. "Good," he said. "But I'm also hungry, so that settled, I'm going to eat this."

"Okay," Tyler said, and picked up his own food, repeating, "Okay."

It still took them an hour to finish lunch and leave, and they walked along the street slowly, in the direction of what Tyler assumed was Jeremy's home. Jeremy swung his hand as he walked, making cheerful brushing motions in the air that reminded Tyler of himself as a little boy, knocking the tops of summer grasses as he ran home. He'd gotten started on music before they left the Grill and had yet to run out of things to say about it. Tyler would have found most of it boring, seeing as he neither knew nor thought that he liked Jeremy's kind of music, but he was fascinated by the way that Jeremy spoke about it. He didn't just list names of bands or facts about their history, but talked about the sound of each song, the melody and the beat and what he thought when heard this lyric or that one. He almost seemed intent on recreating the music in description, and Tyler had never thought someone would do that until he began to wonder if, maybe, Jeremy really could.

It was hard not to think, suddenly, of Vicki, drunk on the music and stolen vodka, dancing in sunbeams.

They stopped halfway down a residential street, under a spreading tree which had left its outline on the ground in snowflakes, and Tyler looked between the yellow house behind them and the two white ones further on and felt a bit cheated, that he wasn't going to learn where Jeremy lived.

"Tomorrow?" he asked, hopefully, and everything looked like sunrise when Jeremy grinned.

"Okay."

"Come over to my place," Tyler suggested, then paused. "Do you…."

"The stupidly large house," Jeremy said dryly. "Yes, Tyler Lockwood, I know where you live."

"The stupidly large house," Tyler confirmed, "up on the hill. It's not my fault, you know."

"Yeah, yeah," Jeremy said, waving him off. "I'm sure. I need to get home now, but yeah. See you tomorrow."

"Okay," Tyler said, but he was already heading off down the street, and he wasn't sure Jeremy could hear him. It didn't matter, anyway: delaying tactics had already won him an hour. It would be a bit much to dig his feet in for a few seconds more.

He turned for home, too, deciding not to spend the whole day in town like he had planned to, for reasons that he didn't really understand.

He'd make sure, he thought. Now more than ever he was determined to have his someday: he'd tell Jeremy about Vicki, and anything and everything else that he could think of, because he'd have to. He needed Jeremy to understand all of that, so that he'd get what it meant when Tyler told him that he thought that maybe this was what he'd wanted to feel for her.

And maybe, just maybe, given what he'd said today, he'd be able to understand it and explain it back to Tyler in a way that wasn't really fucked up, but, Tyler thought, looking up into the clouds, he didn't even really care, because that wasn't what he wanted.

He wasn't certain what he did want. But it had something to do with the way he could say anything he wanted to Jeremy, and something to do with the things that he said back. Part of it was tied up in wanting to understand that twisted, sad and happy smile, and part was just wanting to look at it. Because, in its own way, he thought that it was beautiful.

**...**

**Second Note: I hate Vicki's name. I'm considering setting Autocorrect to spell it right for me, because I am apparently INCAPABLE.**

**Also: Search List of Vampire Diaries Characters on Wikipedia. **

**I submit to you the WORST cast photo I have seen in a long time. Why are Stefan and Damon trying to become one with Elena's hair, especially when there is SO MUCH room on either side, between them and the rest of the cast? Why does Stefan have a humpback and Damon a wrinkly semi-bolero jacket? Why is Jenna hiding behind a line of ionic columns? Why does Jeremy have the worst middle-part the eighties ever produced, Caroline a veritable mane (okay, I can't complain about her hair. Her hair is GOD, probably. Edit: why is she perched in heels on a really tiny stone post? She is going to hurt herself, and that CAN'T HAPPEN.) **

**Why is Tyler standing like that? No, really, that's actually one of my major complaints, not so much because he looks **_**bad,**_** per se, but because the first thing that caught my attention in this image was the way his expression is somewhere between, "Yeah, you **_**know**_** you want me. Just admit it already," and "…Why are Stefan and Damon trying to become one with Elena's hair?" Seriously, if he had his neck twisted back any more skeptically, I would be worried about him. **

**I am already worried that he appears to be sinking into the ground (okay, on closer inspection this isn't warranted: he just has his legs **_**seriously**_** far apart—as…previously mentioned—and there's an awkward leg-truncating fern, and Bonnie.) Still, the photoshopping on that side is…questionable, because Bonnie can't possibly be sitting where she seems to be AND have her hand there: the angle's wrong. She certainly can't be as far in front of Tyler as she is, because his missing leg would be inside the wall, so she must be seated on air. **

**Meanwhile Matt is…awkward. He's….**

**Well, he's missing one hand and I wish he didn't have the other one because Matt, I love you dearly but this season has not been good for you and Tyler is already pretty much saying, "Look at my crotch," so I don't need you doing it too because I don't love you **_**that**_** much and you're kind of flexible and/or weirdly proportioned, because while at first you appear to be sitting upright you're also showing us pretty much EVERYTHING between your legs, which means you must be sitting on your lower back rather than your ass, and black makes you look (actually kind of nicely, if inappropriately) **_**vampiricaly**_** pale, so since you're supposed to be the all-American blond HUMAN character I don't know why you're wearing it, because even thought it LOOKS like black is a theme here glancing at the other side immediately shows that it isn't, because there's purple and Kelly green and brown and….Why? **

**Third/Fourth Note: ELENA, STOP COMPELLING JEREMY TO DO STUFF. (Yes, even if Damon does it for you, it's still you.) KLAUS, I LOVE YOU, BUT THE WHOLE TYLER-AND-YOU THING IS CREEPY. Please go back to perving on Stefan, because you two are cute together, in a very scary way. **


End file.
